Why Lalu is angry with Congress?

The story of seat-sharing talks in Bihar and the twists and turns in the tale are easy to understand if one samples a conversation between senior leaders of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress who have been trying to milk each other dry for a better deal.

At a meeting between RJD chief Lalu Prasad and senior Congress leader Arjun Singh yesterday, the latter is said to have asked Lalu why he was frothing at the mouth over the Jharkhand deal and had gone all over TV threatening to go it alone in Bihar.

A less angry but indignant Prasad reportedly told Singh that he had just described the Congress with "mere" words on TV but in Jharkhand, the Congress had slighted the RJD by clubbing it with "other parties" being offered 13 seats. This was the mood at the meeting where it was decided to take a final call tomorrow on the seat-sharing formula for Bihar.

The meeting was attended by the Left parties as well , who ironically, played the role of keeping the secular alliance together in spite of being the other half of the 'others' which had so precipitated Lalu's wrath.

After Lalu had threatened to contest alone in Bihar, it was Communist party of India (CPI) chief AB Bardhan who talked to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and asked her to make up with Prasad in the interest of keeping the "communal forces" out of Bihar.

Sources said Prasad had asked for a 'criterion' to be framed on the basis of the number of sitting MLAs individual parties had in the state and how many constituencies the parties had come second in so that the seats could be distributed in a realistic manner.

This is hardly a new formula for clinching seat-sharing talks but Prasad had pointed to the new factors in this election ""the UPA constituents contesting together in a pre-poll alliance for the first time, with even the Communist Party of India (CPI) in the alliance and a newly configured Bihar state going to the polls after the formation of Jharkhand""to buy time for the Jharkahand deal to be reworked.

In Jharkhand, the Congress took 33 seats and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) 35, leaving 13 seats for others including the RJD and the Left parties.

The RJD already has 11 sitting MLAs in the state. The CPI has 3 sitting MLAs and is second in 2 seats. The RJD now wants more seats in Jharkahand in exchange of a better deal for the Congress in Bihar which wants as many as 70 seats, which is a scaled-down figure.

The CPI has identified 20 seats and is willing see it further scaled down. The CPI(M) had identified 25 seats and is not likely to get more than 10.

What numbers the RJD gets in Jharkhand will finally decided the contours of the deal in Bihar even as the Left parties describe the situation as one where the oil is just heating in the pan, very far from putting the final touches on and even farther from being served to an audience with panache.